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is it just me...or is it the mmos?

This might be a bit long post, but it covers a lot of years of gaming in mmos

THE SHORT VERSION:
I think i either played waaaay too many mmos and my expectations are too high ,making them not fun to play ( not worth my time then) OR the current mmos offer the same thing that i already been trough...for years..
(If im having fun spending my time on a game, it better be fun, otherwise its a waste of my time)

THE LONG VERSION THAT EXPLAINS MORE:

I've been playing mmos for a loooong time now. I remember my first ever "mmo" experience was playing yugioh and resident evil online on BYOND (fan made multiplayer 2d games). I was about 14 at that time and i had tons of fun playing those games, actually making friends and chatting around.

At around 15 my brother bought me Guild wars Prophecies (the original). That was my first "major" mmo/coop rpg that i played. My brother and i, with the help of the awesome guild we were in played trough all the campaings and dungeons and quests and missions and that single game gaved me 2-3 years of fun experience.

After about 2-3 years i pretty much finished everything that it had to offer me, so i decided to look for some other mmos.
Then i started playing LaTale (on the EU server aeria games used to host). The game has almost nothing similar with GW1 but it was still a amazing game .

I played that game un till the EU server shut down, and i had bad lag on OGPlanet NA server so i couldn't play it there.

So after LaTale, i found about MMOHUT, and i started looking into other mmorpgs...but i usually ended up playing them for a few weeks, a month or two and then simply quitting ( while they were fun to play for a while, eventually they become either too grindy, too pay to win, to much hackers/bots, too deserted etc).

I was even turned off by GW2 after playing it for around 8 months recently cause of a buggy dungeon that made my party and me waste 1 hour only to fail to blast open the gate at the start of the dungeon... not to mention someone from the party even used speed hacking to try to pull the mobs away from the rest of the party so they can try to carry the kegs with explosives to the door...still failed... Not to mention the other bugs,small and big.

Besides the fact that some are just too damn grindy ( 3 weeks of hard core grinding to get from 44-45 in a game with a lvl cap of 100??) , and some are just too damn p2w ( buy -with cash- a vial of 100 000 hp/mp that replenishes your hp/mp when it gets low automatically in a game with absolutely no hp/mp regen and normal pots cost an arm and a leg..oh and when the vial runs out..you buy another one !) And alas , some that i find extremely unique and fun are simply deserted (requiem ).

They all feel like single player games!
They all advertise them selfs as those huge MMOs with hundreds of thousands of players that you get to "play" with...but you spend all of your time leveling alone!

Go play rift, and youll be playing lvl 1-60 solo (dungeons and skirmishes/instant adventures and other instances dont count)

Im talking about the core questing, runing around and killing stuff leveling experience, which is a HUUUGE part in a mmo rpg and the best way to spend it is to be alone (cause its the only normal way to lvl...why would anyone whos lvl 40 go to a lvl 10 friend and run around in a newbie area 1 shot all the mobs he needs for his quests.... it actually ruins your friends lvling experience )

And personally thats one of the biggest problem i have with mmos... i wanna socialise, i wana hang out and chat, i wanna meet people and meet friends and play a massively multiplayer game together...instead everyone goes and does his own thing, in some games people barely even talk!! (try out neverwinter, while its a great game...you are soloing trough quests from lvl 1-60, occasionally doing few dungeons-> WHERE NOBODY TALKS,EVER. Just so you can, after spending weeks, months in your lvl 60 char, join a end game guild and do some dungeons....)

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So honestly, If anyone knows or is playing a mmorpg where you can spend most of your time playing with other people rather that spending 70% of your time running around and questing alone please do share!

In the mean time...ill be playing Dust an elysian tale, lfd2, terraria ,minecraft...even age of empires II cause to be honest...the games that i spend time on should be fun...the SINGLE PLAYER games i mentioned provide me with more fun than a MMOrpg in which you spend 70% of time questing repetitive quests alone so you can lvl up for weeks in order to get to the part of the game where everyone stops running around solo and starts grouping up for dungeons/raids/pvp...

The only "real" MMORPG for me is Ragnarok Online. When it first came out, I get to party with other players to get exp by battling stronger monsters. When not leveling, I hang around with other players just to chat and stuff. But all of this are gone now. Just like you I've tried a lot of MMORPG's. IMO, I think we're just looking for games that has something new to offer but still incorporates the good-old-MMO spirit of party-leveling and stuff.

At the moment, I'm still playing Ragnarok Online but on Private Servers. I don't like the 3rd class--they're OP and not balanced. I'm also playing Eclipse War from time to time since they're on CBT. Other MMORPG's that I'm playing includes Dragon Nest and Eden Eternal.

The only "real" MMORPG for me is Ragnarok Online. When it first came out, I get to party with other players to get exp by battling stronger monsters. When not leveling, I hang around with other players just to chat and stuff. But all of this are gone now. Just like you I've tried a lot of MMORPG's. IMO, I think we're just looking for games that has something new to offer but still incorporates the good-old-MMO spirit of party-leveling and stuff.

At the moment, I'm still playing Ragnarok Online but on Private Servers. I don't like the 3rd class--they're OP and not balanced. I'm also playing Eclipse War from time to time since they're on CBT. Other MMORPG's that I'm playing includes Dragon Nest and Eden Eternal.

pretty much the same for me as well, the only thing that came close to that feeling of playing RO was WoW. Once I got the PvP gear I needed from Arena's, I just sat around and chatted with some buddies.
From time to time we would go around together and PvP.
Had some awesome times with the group too, we would all rush into Iron forge and take shelter in one of the small buildings, people would come in one by one and just die.

Now.. I try to play the game for the game itself but honestly, its no where close to being fun without a good group of friends to play with.
Yeah the game itself may be fun for what it is, but I just can't get sucked into it like I did with RO and WoW.

I used to play OldSchool MapleStory. It used to be a Lot of grinding, but, hell, it was still fun because of how many people played. How many friends I made. Sometimes I would just log in to hang out, play mini games, have fun. 6 hours of playing, and I didn't even get 10% to get to the next level. And I'm talking about when I was around lv 30, (level cap was 200). It was just fun.

Nowadays, I go back to it, it's all about competition, who's the best, pay for this, pay for that. I reached level 144, without making a single friend. That is extremely disappointing and depressing. The friends I made back in the day are still with me today. 7 years of friendship because of a childish online game. I wish it still provided this kind of fun. I totally see you bro.

Now MMO developers strongly lean toward quantity over quality. They think the only way to achieve longevity is to make players grind for a sense of progressions. It's not.

After 10,000 dead goblins, 25,000 retrieved baubles, and 4 emptied bedpans grinding feels like grinding. Regardless of whether the game is new or old it kills the experience fast because we've done it countless times before.
The next generation of MMOs needs to take a new direction.

As already stated, linear grind style is out. Players should want to play the game because it's fun not because it's their second job.

Players need to care about their world. Most developers seem to build a world and stick a plot in it.
The story should come first.

I would personally build an MMO like a single player game. Have a good 10-20 hour single player experience then unleash the players into the world. No levels just entertaining, fun content.

Note I have a bit of ADD and it's really hard for me to focus/organize my thoughts, especially when I am getting tired. So, this is about 32313 words shorter than I intended.

The days where you sit around leveling on monsters for hours and chatting with friends are pretty much gone, people basically said they hated that. PvP and endless endgame MMOS are all that exist because that is what people asked for. For me the last game that existed like what you are describing was Glitch and that shutdown.

I remember back in high school how much I looked forward to coming home and playing Maplestory or Ragnarok or Fairyland with my friends and just talking for hours about everything and nothing. How much we looked forward to finally reaching a level or finding a rare drop. Talking while waiting for our MP to recover...That's the kind of stuff that was fun to me and what I have fond memories of. All that social stuff is what makes an MMO and MMO and they've basically removed all of that in exchange for "follow this questline to the end of the game!" and in a few days to a week tops you're there. Without the grind, it just really seems like a lot of what you work for isn't even worth it.

Hopefully, we'll get a taste of what we miss when Tree of Savior comes out. That game looks and sounds like it might have the potential to reawaken that spark in gaming that seems to be missing, but I don't want to get my hopes up too much. I've kind of settle down with some games to kill some time and provide me with a decent social experience. The "Raid" style games such as Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Warframe where you spend countless hours hunting bosses or killing monsters for drops and exp are keeping me busy. And they are really enjoyable to play with people.

Side note but there's an anime/manga called Log Horizon that depicts what MMOS used to be like and what made them fun. They just don't make MMORPGs like that anymore and it's a damn shame.

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